How can I make my Open Mic stories pop?

As you could’ve guessed Medium.com was the biggest inspiration when we were designing The Open Mic.

We always admired the cleanness of their design.

Zero clatter. Emphasis on the content and the author. Great usage of white space and images.

Of course, Medium is probably much more advanced than The Open Mic (from the technological point of view, after all they have the best engineers and designers behind their platform), but we feel like we’ve come pretty close.

[clickToTweet tweet=”The Open Mic helps translators share stories and ideas in a new and visually stunning way.” quote=”The Open Mic helps translators share stories and ideas in a new and visually stunning way.”]

And here’s how you can make the most of it:

Don’t Forget about the Featured Image

The Featured Image is something that is placed at the top of your story to make it more visually appealing.

It will also be used by social networks when someone shares your Open Mic story on Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

This is how you can add a Featured Image to your story:

1. Click on Select Featured Image

2. Upload Your Image

3. Click Choose Image

4. The image will show up in the editor box

And there you have it 🙂 Don’t forget to click Save Draft.

A couple of things you should bear in mind when adding Featured Images:

The recommended dimensions: 1700 x 700. Smaller images will be stretched out and might look weird.

Be mindful of image size. The image size should beno more than 2 MB everything that is more than that might take longer to upload and consequently it might affect the page load. Please make sure you resize the images befoe you upload them, thank you! 🙂

Don’t forget to give credit to the author of the image (if it’s required). I normally recommend using images from Pexels.com and Unsplash.com. These are the two most popular websites for beautiful stock images that can be used for free anywhere on the web. Pexeles.com even allows you to select sizes or chose your own size: